The Mysteries of John the Baptist

by Tobias Churton

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

  The same was in the beginning with God.

  All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

  In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

  And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

  There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

  The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

  That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

  He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

  He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

  Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (1:1–13)

  There is, of course, an entire religion in these words.

  It is generally held by scholars that the references to John, viz, “He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light” were a deliberate attempt to scotch residual beliefs among John’s followers that he, John, was the Messiah. If so, those beliefs must have been very strong indeed. If we accept a date of ca. 90–130 CE for this Gospel, those beliefs must have been remarkably persistent. According to this view, John was being taken by followers to be “the Light,” the one who revealed the essence of salvation, long, long after his death.

  John’s Gospel, then, trumps this view with nothing less than the testimony of John the Baptist himself ! This explains with satisfying economy why the fourth Gospel takes the name of John: John the Baptist.

  John was the true Evangelist.

  John himself elucidates why the Son of God must take primacy over him. It is because the Logos came “before him.” The Son is a power, the wisdom, behind the universe: the only one who can ultimately create and save, the only one with the right and the means to destroy.

  However, John’s Gospel does not deny that John was sent by God to make the Son manifest to Israel. John begins as the center of religious interest. Priests and Levites leave Jerusalem to go to John. His testimony opens the Gospel on completion of the prologue. He is temporary narrator and subject:

  John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, “This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me.” And of his fullness [plērōmatos, a term favored by Gnostics for the Father or Godhead] have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who art thou?”

  And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ.

  And they asked him, “What then? Art thou Elias?” [Greek form of Elijah]

  And he saith, “I am not.” “Art thou that prophet?” And he answered, “No.” Then said they unto him, “Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?”

  He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.” And they, which were sent, were of the Pharisees.

  And they asked him, and said unto him, “Why baptizest thou then, if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet?”

  John answered them, saying, “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.”

  These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing.

  The neutral voice of the narrator now reappears, but John is soon back with his “Behold the Lamb of God” speech and the ensuing drama flows from John. After the baptism, two of John’s disciples, one named as Andrew, brother of “Simon Peter,” leave John. They follow the one the Baptist has called a second time “the Lamb of God.” Andrew’s brother then joins them. Having been informed that his brother and the unnamed disciple of John have “found the Messias,” Jesus gets his operation going.

  John showed them the way.

  How much historical fact might lie behind this extraordinary, cross-pollinating narrative is anybody’s guess. It does not read like history and it is not meant to be history; it is really meta-history. The essence of the “events” takes place on another plane: a higher plane. Such may be hinted at in the otherwise prosaic-looking statement of the gospel writer that “these things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was baptizing” (1:28). Beth is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew for “house” and abarah is the Hebrew for a ford or crossing place. While on the one hand we may be talking of a convenient spot on a tributary east of the Jordan, the “ford” and the “house” suggest the presence of a ferry. Symbolically, the “ferryman” may then be seen as John-Hermes. Hermes, remember, was seen in Hellenistic tradition as a “psychopomp”: literally a guide of souls through the darkness of death to the other side, the herald of another world attainable only through death. Johanan means “God comforts.” Hermes bridges boundaries from the divine to the human: in Jungian terms, from the unconscious to the conscious and back again. Greeks would make a sacrifice to Hermes before going on a journey.

  Think again of Leonardo’s John, with his upwardly pointing finger. May we not also see this as a beckoning finger, indicating the words: “this way”—and is not this way “across the ford,” through the darkness from which John emerges? There is of course a well-known link between the passage of symbolic death, rebirth, and baptism.

  The baptismal events in John’s Gospel illustrate spiritual insights of great depth; one is reminded of Brecht’s dictum that “realism does not consist in reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are.” Dramatic truth transcends journalism. Even so, it has long been recognized that the fourth Gospel does contain unusual pieces of authentic period background unrecorded in the synoptic (or broadly similar) Gospels. We meet new characters, such as Nicodemus; new events, such as the wedding at Cana; new miracles, such as the raising of Lazarus from the dead. In fact, we get a new perspective altogether, so new in fact that John was not accepted by all churches as authoritative scripture for some time. What is more, John flatly contradicts the assumptions and plain statements of both Matthew and Luke that the Baptist was a prophet—that he was Elijah—the prophesied messenger, returned.

  When in Matthew 11, John hears, even though in prison, what Jesus has been doing, he dispatches two disciples to ask, “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” This sounds credible, possibly even historical. John’s John of course would hardly need to enquire. He has seen the Logos in the flesh!

  However, it is not entirely clear whether the imprisoned Baptist is asking whether Jesus is the “messenger,” that is, Elijah, or whether he is the one for whom Elijah must make straight the path. In trying to explain matters to his disciples, Jesus emphasized it is John who “is Elias, which has for to come.” If, that is, they “will receive it,” meaning, if the disciples can understand the teaching and deal with the statement’s import. According to this account, John was Elias returned, but perhaps did not realize it himself!

  One might have thought that it was clear by now to Matthew and Luke that John was the messenger, but Luke’s account of the visit of John’s disciples to Jesus to find out who he is leaves the question hanging in the air.

  Luke prefaces his treatment of John’s disciples’ visit with a stupendous miracle. Coming to a city called Nain, southwest of the Sea of Galilee, near the Judea-Galilee border, Jesus is called to a widow’s grief. The widow’s son, a young man, has d
ied. Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead. The significance here is that the story is an almost precise repeat of Elijah’s raising of the widow’s son from the dead in 1 Kings 17:17. In Luke’s account, this parallel is not at all lost on the people who observe it. The implication is clear; they take the miracle as a sure sign that Elijah has returned. The miracle man in Nain must be the great Prophet! The time of the Messiah has come:

  And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, “That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people.” And this rumor of him went forth throughout all Judaea, and throughout all the region round about.

  And the disciples of John shewed him of all these things. And John calling unto him two of his disciples sent them to Jesus, saying, “Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?”

  When the men were come unto him, they said, “John Baptist hath sent us unto thee, saying, Art thou he that should come? Or look we for another?” And in that same hour he cured many of their infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that were blind he gave sight.

  Then Jesus answering said unto them, “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.” (Luke 7:16–23)

  Luke’s account leaves John’s disciples in no doubt. They need look no further for the one who is to come. Jesus has ticked all the expected boxes of what the Messiah should do, including the raising of the dead.

  John’s disciples having left, Luke has Jesus say that John is “much more than a prophet” (v. 26), though he does not say why. Unlike Matthew, he does not, for some reason, say directly that John is Elijah either. He seems to hold something of that dignity in some sense to himself (see also Luke 4:26ff.). Instead, he alludes to the messenger prophecy of Malachi: “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee,” without Malachi’s conclusion, that is, that the messenger was Elijah. Luke cannot bring himself to repeat Matthew’s words about Elijah because of what he next takes from Matthew: “For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” Luke’s slap-in-the-face caveat might not have been thought appropriate for Elijah, but it was, apparently, appropriate for John. One cannot help thinking, in reaction, that we are in the Pauline territory of distinguishing between the alleged two baptisms, of water, and of the Holy Ghost, with John being given a theological kiss-off.

  There is no doubt that this switching here and there about John’s real status is puzzling. It perhaps explains why the author of John’s Gospel, as if having the last word, wipes aside all doubt and ambiguity: John was not the Christ. John was not Elijah. John was not a prophet. John was quoting a prophet, Isaiah: “I am the voice [or sound] crying [or shouting aloud] in the desert.” John is the sound, the only sound, in the emptiness.

  We should perhaps look more closely at the magical poetry of John’s quotation from Isaiah. Taking the “desert” as a metaphor, that is, as an image for a bare, empty, hard, lifeless, perhaps even spiritless place, may we not see “John” as the cry, the embodied sound, the mantra emitted from within and beyond that world: the long pain of the world, longing, yearning for spiritual rain? Then John is the anguish of the world. Thus is he greater than a prophet, for no ordinary prophet could stand for so much, and yet the smallest one who has already entered the kingdom of God is greater than he who is crying outside of it, a voice in the wilderness. And, mark, it is not as though John’s message was unheard, as we usually think when we use the phrase about someone being “a voice crying in the wilderness,” as was employed of Winston Churchill, for example, when his warnings about Germany during the 1930s went largely unheeded and which times in his life came to be called “the wilderness years.”

  John was heard, even by them that did not see, in the wilderness.

  John’s Gospel is unique among canonical Gospels for showing a most unexpected scenario. John and Jesus are shown as both baptizing, possibly even in the same place, apparently at the same time. Again, there is no mention of Jesus’s baptism being any different from John’s:

  After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized. And John also was baptizing in Aenon near to Salim, because there was much water there: and they came, and were baptized. For John was not yet cast into prison. (John 3:22–24)

  Aenon is only a couple of miles west of the Jordan, on the opposite bank to the Brook Cherith where Elijah is said to have sojourned during the great famine described in 1 Kings 17, some twenty miles south of the Sea of Galilee in what was the Decapolis. Whatever they were up to, the plain statement that Jesus baptized is contradicted at the beginning of the following chapter:

  When therefore the Lord knew how the Pharisees had heard that Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, (Though Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples,) He left Judaea, and departed again into Galilee. (John 4:1–3)

  This all sounds peculiar, and the lacuna is not picked up in any way; the narrative runs on elsewhere. The explanation may be because the author has realized the theological implications of Jesus and John baptizing. If their baptisms were of the same nature, as this little story suggests, then in what way could it be justified that John’s baptism was allegedly deficient, as it is presented in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? If we look carefully at John’s account of Jesus’s baptism, however, it is not there stated that one comes after John who will baptize with the Holy Spirit. He does not seem to be very interested in the Pauline baptism distinction. “He who sent him [John],” having been sent by the Father, was sent to baptize with water. It was God’s will. The gospel writer’s understanding of the Holy Spirit comes later. The “Comforter” will be sent “in my name” some time in the future (John 14:26). So Jesus does not baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire, for the Holy Ghost has not yet been sent. Jesus baptizes with water, as do his disciples. They are doing the same as John.

  We seem to have something of a competition between John and Jesus in the baptism stakes; Jesus seems to be winning, in terms of numbers anyway. Again, the authorities seem to be trying to work out which of the two is greater, or perhaps more dangerous: Jesus or John, a competition that must look most unedifying to us today, but which is a significant concern for the gospel’s writer. Indeed, John gives us a rather odd conversation about the matter (3:25–36). The debate takes place originally between a group called “the Jews” (a habitual expression in the fourth Gospel) and some of John’s disciples (were they not Jews too?), before abruptly switching to a debate between “the Jews” (or properly, the Judeans—possibly in distinction to Galileans) and John himself. The subject is ostensibly an academic one about “purifying”: a subject we have examined in detail.

  The subtext of the debate involves “the Jews” (or Judeans) trying to put a wedge between John and Jesus. They sneer by implication that Jesus has taken John’s baptism and is now attracting bigger crowds than John. John’s answer is to say that he is a friend of Jesus; he applauds what is clearly God’s work. Jesus is entitled to the prize; John’s joy is fulfilled. Jesus’s success is his success. John then gives a classic “Johannine” speech, aimed straight at the questioners and their real nature, which the Baptist perceives. They are of the earth; they do not see or understand heavenly things. If they did, they would not ask such stupid questions! If they fail to see “the Son,” they will deny themselves eternal life. They will find the wrath of God abiding in them instead, for God is eternal life, and he is wrath; it depends on the will, as well as the capacity, to receive truth, as to what of God a man will experience:

  Then there arose a question between some of John’s disciples and the Jews about “purifying.” And they came unto John, a
nd said unto him, “Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou barest witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to him.”

  John answered and said, “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled.

  “He must increase, but I must decrease.

  “He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is above all. And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man receiveth his testimony. He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God is true. For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand. He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” (John 3:25–36)

  This is John’s testimony, according to John, and such is its power that I have myself little doubt in ascribing the title of the Gospel to John the Baptist, a long overdue ascription.

  As for its historicity, or of its value as telling us about the “real John,” well, it is hard to imagine that the author’s idea of what was real about John was what would interest a historian. There can be little doubt that the author was convinced truth was being conveyed. Since John was a messenger of truth, he could hardly object. I do not think we are receiving verbatim reports of John’s words or anything like them. They are too contrived for that.